Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Is Coogan’s Dr Strangelove as good as Sellers’s? Of course not

Plus: Netflix needs to come to the rescue of this over-stuffed play about Lincoln's assassination

Steve Coogan as the bland, well-meaning President Muffley, in a scene dominated by Giles Terera’s magnificently aggressive General Turgidson. Photo: Manuel Harlan 
issue 02 November 2024

Stanley Kubrick’s surreal movie Dr Strangelove is a response to the fear of nuclear annihilation which obsessed every citizen in the western world from the end of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The play’s co-adaptors, Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci, are old enough to recall that fear – but they’ve omitted any sense of collective anxiety from their adaptation. It’s a just a larky tribute to the movie, like a sketch show. Daft not disturbing.

It turns out Dr Strangelove is like Father Christmas – more potent as a mythical abstraction than as a reality

The story starts with an insane American, General Ripper, ordering a squadron of B-52s to nuke Russia before the communists can overwhelm the United States. This prompts his amiable British colleague, Captain Mandrake, to ask him to call off the attack. Steve Coogan plays Mandrake as a bumbling Home Counties swot with the diction and mannerisms of King Charles. His vocabulary is improbably prolix. Listening to a burst of Elvis on the radio, Mandrake says: ‘You can practically hear the chap’s coccyx oscillating.’ That’s too cerebral to be funny. But the opening scene works very well because of the absurd contrast between Coogan’s geeky charm and the suicidal intensity of General Ripper (an excellent John Hopkins). We then cut to the war room.

Coogan reappears as the bland, well-meaning President Muffley which gives him few opportunities to shine. These sections are dominated by Giles Terera’s magnificently aggressive General Turgidson, whose bickering with the Russian ambassador descends into a poorly choreographed fistfight. Muffley breaks it up with the famous line: ‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here: this is the war room.’ Then, after a quick change of costume, Dr Strangelove appears. And he’s a disappointment, oddly enough. It turns out that Dr Strangelove is like Father Christmas or Stonehenge – more potent as a mythical abstraction than as a reality.

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